Ion Georgiou

The premise of my research is that the effectiveness of a decision-maker is not demonstrated through access to better or more information: the effectiveness of a decision-maker is demonstrated in an ability to use, more resourcefully, whatever limited information is available, and to portray its implications more usefully. Correlatively, in a world faced with systemic problems, what is especially required is a decision-maker who can meet the paradoxical demand for useful and practical systemic results in the face of partial information, or equally, for implementable wholes in the face of informational incompleteness.

In particular, my research program’s:
- overarching mission is to contribute to the effective tackling of complexity;
- specific  contribution lies in its development of decision processes for facilitating the identification of the contextually correct questions and problem formulations in situations characterized by disorder, dispersion, and disunion;
- field of application is any tangled network of competing problem formulations socially constructed by diverse stakeholders, whose perspectives and actions are interdependent and continuously altered as a consequence of incremental learning;
- primary quantitative method is graph theory for it provides mathematical models that, instead of oversimplifying reality, enable an integral consideration of its interrelations;
- guiding principle is the avoidance of solving the wrong problem by employing a method incongruent with that of the situation under investigation; and,
- byproducts have included contributions to the history of the decision sciences in business and public administration, the modeling of scholarly networks, phenomenological epistemology, and experiential learning pedagogy.

My interdisciplinary perspective creates bridges across dualistic debates in methodology (e.g. measure-oriented positivism vs meaning-infused interpretivism), in ontology (e.g. stability-focused realism vs interactively-reproductive constructionism), and in problematics (e.g. motive-oriented choice vs structurally-focused constraint), and confirms my ability to work comfortably across contexts and academic disciplines, with each particular immersion serving to further develop approaches and content in my research and teaching. In general, my cohesive, interdisciplinary approach to research promotes creative and innovative problem-solving as well as an approach to intellectual pursuits that allows for a balanced perspective between fields.